


When the Levee Breaks

by wingstocarryon (wings_of_crows)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Child Neglect, Gen, Non-Consensual Bondage, Parent Death, Past Rape/Non-con Themes, Post-Episode: s09e10 Road Trip, Post-Gadreel (Supernatural), Suicidal Ideation, non-consensual magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-04 20:24:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18820069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wings_of_crows/pseuds/wingstocarryon
Summary: Come on man, can’t you see, I’m poison. People get close to me they get killed, or worse. I tell myself I help more people than I hurt and I tell myself that I’m doing it all for the right reasons and I believe that. But I can’t -- I won’t drag anyone anybody into the muck with me - not anymore.Go. I’m not going to stop you. But don’t go thinking that’s the problem because it’s not.What’s that supposed to mean?-Season 9 Episode 10, Road Trip





	When the Levee Breaks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [verucasalt123](https://archiveofourown.org/users/verucasalt123/gifts).



Sam stood in the middle of the 34 West outside of Highwater Pass, Colorado, a flare in one hand, shotgun in the other. The rain made the road a black river too fast and deep to show its danger. Away to the left, through the thick pines, he could just see where the cliff dropped into nothing.

Sam wanted to lie down in this road. Rest his head. There were other things on his mind, but he couldn’t feel them right now. They hovered, on the edge of his consciousness, fluttery things with wings and gaunt fists that wanted in. Lucifer was there somewhere among them. Dean was there. Gadreel…

He was so tired. Unutterably tired.

Still. He had one last thing to do. 

*

Dean was rounding a curve when red light flared, and he saw a man standing in the middle of the road. A parked car blocked the other lane. Dean braked hard, cursing, and skidded into the wet shoulder.

He rolled down his window into the muzzle of Sam’s shotgun. 

“What the hell happened to calling?” 

Sam didn’t crack a smile. Dean took in the shadows under his eyes, the too thin face. The gun pointed at his own head. 

“Sammy? What the hell are you doin’ here?”

“Get out.”

He got out slow, hands up. He felt Sam reaching for his belt to take the 1911 and in that moment moved in for the disarm and got the Taurus too easy, swung away and checked the chamber. Empty. He was almost laughing as he turned around. _Sammy. This a joke?_ Sam dodged his fist and stepped back out of the way. He wasn’t trying to fight, wasn’t doing anything but retreat. Dean swung again, tried to pin him.

“What’s going on, Sam?”

The red flare sputtering on the road caught his eye, seemed to waver. There was something wrong with the road. It was moving under him. He staggered, the world weaving, and the blacktop rushed up to meet him. Last thing he felt were Sam’s arms, closing around him before he went under.

*

He was being dragged. It smelled like wet, like rotting leaves. His knees were soaking. He was finding it hard to breathe. 

“Sam?” he got out.

He was hoisted up, in a fireman’s carry. His hands were cuffed, he realized. Then he was on his back on a table. Picnic table on a bluff, a sheer cliff dropping away a few feet off. The mountains and the grey sky circled him crazily. He was trying to cling to Sam’s arm, but Sam was doing something and then Dean couldn’t move his hands and his legs were - Sam was pulling rope around them. 

“Sammy? What the—”

“Dilauded,” said Sam. “In your coffee twenty minutes ago. You left it in the car when you went in to pay again after that credit card bounced. You didn’t wonder about that card?” 

“You... drugged me ...and then you let me _drive_?”

Sam snorted. 

“Like it’s the first time you’ve done that.”

“Yeah well I like to know what’s in my noggin.”

He caught Sam’s expression and looked away.

Sam was finish with Dean’s legs, and Dean could not move. Could not think. Sam was supposed to be home at the bunker. Dean was chasing the First Blade. Sam must have… must have been that tip this morning, about Cain out past this highway. Shit.

He cleared his throat. “Just out of curiosity, is there a reason I need to be tied to this table?”

Sam stood back, surveyed his handiwork. His face was pinched, that look he got when he hadn’t been eating and had been up thirty-six, forty hours. He looked like the trials hadn’t been healed out of him at all. Like he was about to keel over.

“You ok, man?”

Sam laughed aloud. The sound made Dean’s stomach twist, echoed in that gorge. He heaved at the ropes, suddenly.

“I’m just peachy,” said Sam.

He was rooting in a duffel bag on the bench. Took out a copper bowl, bloodwort, yarrow. An angel blade. Dean squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head, opened them. _Pull yourself together, you fucker._

“Can we talk about this?” he rasped. 

Sam sucked in a lip, counting out drops of something into the bowl. He looked up diffidently. “Talk all you want.” He set the bowl down carefully.

“This is about Gadreel.”

Sam’s expression was bitter, ironic. He shrugged, like they were discussing the weather, instead of an angel who’d been in his brain only a week and a half earlier. Dean had had to call in Crowley to break into Sam’s mind. There was no sign, now, of the needles that had been drilled into his brother’s brain. Dean could imagine them anyway.

 _I’m sorry_ , Dean wanted to say. Even though he wasn’t sorry that Sam was here. Dean’s heart was a hole. A black hole. Come near and you swan dive into nothing. _Don’t leave me._ He wanted to say it. He knew this was why he wasn’t even fighting. He knew he deserved whatever this was. He just didn’t want Sam to be the one doing it. He was frightened, most of all, of what Sam might become. 

“I told you I was gonna take care of Gadreel,” rasped Dean. “Gonna take care of all of them.” 

Sam said nothing.

Dean thought, _I know I’m poison. I know, I know._

*

Sam left fingerprints of his own blood on Dean’s face as he drew sigils on Dean’s chest. _Inverted life, essence._ Then holy oil on his forehead, eyelids, throat, heart, on his palms and the soles of his feet. Sam sat heavily on the wet bench and pulled off his shoes to anoint himself the same way. That was purification, and the herbs were for death and for something else. Dean knew them, knew the smell but couldn’t place it. He drifted on the smoke, watching Sam work, standing barefoot in the damp earth beside the table, blood still dripping from his left palm. 

He didn’t start to panic until Sam took the angel blade and started unbuttoning his own shirt. His face was perfectly blank as he positioned the tip below his own heart. Dean heard him breathe out as he pushed the blade in, carved a line. Blood dripped as he cut again, again. A square, a window of blood, an inch wide.  He fell forward, catching himself on Dean’s leg, eyes squeezed shut with pain. A sliver of white dripped from the wound, too bright to look at, brighter even than grace. Dean was shouting, but Sam just caught it in the copper bowl.

He was efficient as he blocked Dean’s nose and forced his mouth open. It was like fire in his mouth, too bright to feel. He fought Sam’s hand over his mouth. He fought swallowing until his vision went black. When he finally swallowed it scorched, the heat a shard splintering Dean’s heart. He yelled, or thought he did. He was gone. 

*

Sam lay his head on the edge of the picnic table. He was bleeding, somewhere far away, but it didn’t matter. Dean lay still next to him, bound by ropes, as if that made him harmless.

In his mind, Sam could still hear Dean’s laugh in that mind-space Gadreel had created for him. The Dean there had been smiling, joking about cheerleaders in that way that made Sam fond, exasperated. He longed for it, dully, like a creature driven beyond pain longs for pain again.

*

The world reassembled into a cot, white blankets. It took a moment to realize the baby lying there was Sammy.

His chubby face was peaceful, his eyes closed. The five year old next to him lay half on the cot, half off, clutching baby Sammy’s hand. How could Dean ever have been that tiny? 

There were flames painting the wall —no, not flames, lights. Police lights, silent. The click of a door opening, and a police sergeant stood there against the light of the hotel hallway. Next to him —

 _Dad?_ Dean said.

“…that’s it, then,” the sergeant was saying. “… all we found.”

“Thank you, officer.” His dad’s voice didn’t sound like him, rough.

“Have you given a thought to… funeral arrangements?” 

Dean didn’t hear John’s reply, just a murmur of apologies and the door respectfully shutting. 

John didn’t turn on the light, and the wall behind him swarmed blue with the lights. In a moment they would go. In a moment it would be empty. 

The lights slid, slid away. A terrible dullness followed, a terrible stillness. A terrible normality of traffic outside.

John turned and buried his fist in the wall.

Down on the cot, baby Sammy woke up and started crying.

*

“Your death is not worth this,” Cas had told Sam. 

Sam hadn’t agreed. Sam had wanted the needle plunged deeper, the well of himself sucked dry, his tainted marrow out. The angel’s grace still seemed to ring in his ears, pooled in the syringe. He wondered if he had Lucifer’s grace in him too. 

For the evil to be gone, himself going with it seemed fair enough. Suck out the evil, give yourself rest. All in one go. He could be a sacrifice on an altar. He had an angel right here to collect it. To collect him.

But Cas had pulled the needle out, put it away, and Sam had been too weak to argue. Cas had fed him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Had given him water when it hurt to swallow. 

“I would like you to go on,” Cas had said. “How will you go on, Sam?”

*

The tiny child who was Dean just watched, his face like a mask, his voice mute, as the man picked Sammy up, carrying him away. The kid got up, drawn towards them.

Dean saw that the kid had wet his pyjamas. 

_Go back to bed,_ he thought.

“Where’s Mom?”

John turned, Sam still crying in his arms. His face was exhaustion itself.

“Go back to bed, Dean.”

He put a hand on Dean’s head for a moment as he moved by him, pacing with Sam. He hadn’t even noticed Dean’s pyjamas. Dean was all alone, on the floor of this unfamiliar room, in wet pyjamas. 

“Are they gonna bring Mom soon?” Dean said.

John had put Sam down on the cabinet by the bed, was opening the drawers. Pulling out the bottle and there was formula, dried powder. He opened a package with his teeth, measured out the scoops. Sammy was crying louder than ever now. It wasn’t the right kind of formula. Dean knew that. Dean was crying too, silently. John was not looking at him. He was pouring the water into the bottle, realizing it was too cold, cursing.

“Can you be quiet!” he said to the baby.

 _Go to bed_ , Dean thought. _Be a good boy and go to bed. Don’t ask any more. Don’t speak. Just _…__

__But Dean said again. “Dad? When’s Mom coming?”_ _

__Dad turned. The bottle dropped from his hands. He looked lost, like a child grown big, not a dad. “She’s not coming, Dean. She’s not coming back.”_ _

__*_ _

__Sammy was on the cot, on a fresh blanket on top of the peed-on one, and Dean had no pyjama pants but there was a sheet over him, and he felt strange and alone. Dad was a lump on the other bed, so still. Dean was all alone in the world._ _

__He knew. He knew deep down that she was gone because of him._ _

__He was a monster for loving her too much. He’d driven her away, that’s why she wasn’t coming back. He knew it. He was poison._ _

__He pulled himself in tight, small._ _

__Something closed over his finger. A hand, tiny and strong. It clenched tightly._ _

__And then something happened. Something different from the memory, something Dean didn’t remember. Light blazed, that pure white light Dean had seen drip from Sam’s chest. The baby opened his eyes, and Dean was suddenly —_ _

___Was suddenly the baby. And he saw, he saw now. Through Sammy’s eyes…_ _ _

__The one Sammy loved._ _

__*_ _

__Dean opened his eyes. He saw pale sky, moon overhead. His hand went to his chest. It seemed normal. His whole body was shaking. He realized he was untied._ _

__He turned his head, and Sam wasn’t there. Cliff edge, trees dripping, silence._ _

__His heart beat hard._ _

__“Sam?” He croaked._ _

__“Yes.” A whisper. He turned his head the other way. Sam was sitting on his other side, hunched on the bench. Tear tracks on his face. Oh._ _

__He wanted to say “Are you ok,” but what came out was “What did you do to me?”_ _

__“Gave you a piece of my soul,” said Sam in a low voice._ _

___“What?”_ _ _

__“Just a sliver,” said Sam. “Don’t worry. I’m sure I won’t need it.”_ _

__The bitterness in his voice was still there. The terror in Dean was still there. Black hole, needs filling. _Don’t reach out, don’t grab his arm, don’t drag him to you. Don’t hold on and never let go. You sick fuck for wanting him. You monster for loving too much.__ _

__But there was something else there. Dean was also that baby. In his mind, Dean was baby Sam, turned over in his sleep, contented. He turned towards his brother Dean. He curled his hand out and squeezed Dean’s finger, Dean’s heart. He felt something that was beyond words, something like home._ _

__It made Dean dizzy._ _

__“It’s a way of sharing a memory,” said Sam. “That poison crap. You think that’s the problem, but it’s not.”_ _

__His voice was raw, cracking. His nails dug into the wet bench beneath him. Stared down into that cliff, a few feet away._ _

__Dean massaged his chest. He felt raw inside, the black hole still there. But somehow it wasn’t his whole vision, wasn’t… everything. He felt the baby, warm thought, warm weight. He took a breath, he looked up. Away from the nothing. Out at Sam._ _

__Sam was sitting like a hunched kid, his bare feet on the bench in front of him, hugging his knees. He looked old, carrying too much grief to handle. He was staring down the cliff as though he could not look away._ _

__“I don’t have the hope to keep going,” said Sam._ _

__Dean raised a shaky hand and reached for him. Sam drew back._ _

__Dean let his hand drop._ _

___“Sam,”_ he said. He took a breath, let it out. Looked away. Didn’t apologize._ _

__“Tell me,” he said, quiet._ _

__Sam didn’t seem to understand._ _

__“Please?”_ _

__Sam turned his face slowly, blinked, focussed._ _

__“About the, the problem,” said Dean. “I’m. I’m listenin’.”_ _

__*_ _

__Sam drew in a breath, like waking up. Slowly, his knee moved towards Dean’s hand. Dean’s hand landed, squeezed. Sam’s eyes closed. Sam’s reality turned, inside him, to face home._ _

**Author's Note:**

> For all the little children who are left and alone.


End file.
